4Liberty: Spring in Poland: Liberal View on Robert Biedron’s New Political Party

Robert Biedron’s project may be strategically significant if it leads to gaining the support of the entire leftist electorate before the forthcoming parliamentary elections. In this scenario, Robert Biedron would succeed in minimizing the loss of votes that may be otherwise issued in favor of the Razem or the Green parties, etc., but which would not be enough to land these parties any parliamentary seats.[...]

The launch of the Spring party has one crucial advantage: its leaders must now reveal the party platform. When analyzing the planks recently presented by Robert Biedron, a praise should be the starting point. It must be clearly stated that a bold party platform covering issues of ideology, gender equality, minority rights, secular state is very much needed and deserves a spokesperson in Poland.[...]

However, from he liberal perspective, the planks related to ideology are the only part worth praise. The presented socio-economic program is a combination of wishful thinking, social populism, and (oddly enough) ultra-liberalism mixed with lack of any serious financial analysis that would explain how the proposed changes shall be financed (and who should pay for them).[...]

Robert Biedron’s Spring has one more advantage. It is chiefly a party of a new generation and a group of thirty- and fourty-year-olds. Although I’m not a hard-core supporter of promoting only young politicians (I welcomed, for instance, the news that the European Coalition is created with participation of such seasoned politicians as Radosław Sikorski or Marek Belka), it is evident that Polish political scene suffers from a generation gap.

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Foreign Policy: The Future of Politics Is Coming to Poland

Since the implosion of the post-communist left in the mid-2000s, Poland has been governed alternatively by the national-conservative Law and Justice and the centrist Civic Platform, which have finished first and second in every election during that period. Together, they currently hold some 80 percent of seats in parliament and continue to dominate in the polls, with a combined 65 percent or so support. They set the agenda, with their mutual antagonism fueling Poland’s toxic political environment, often dubbed the “Polish-Polish war.” This was especially evident in the wake of the recent murder of Gdansk Mayor Pawel Adamowicz, with initial hopes for a display of national unity quickly dashed as the two political camps began using the tragedy to attack one another.

However, there are reasons to suspect that this duopoly may be more fragile than it appears. Polls consistently show Kaczynski and Grzegorz Schetyna, the leader of Civic Platform, to be the country’s two most distrusted politicians. A poll published this week found that 71 percent thought Kaczynski should retire from politics. Just as Civic Platform lost power in 2015 having run out of ideas and energy after eight years in office (and has recovered neither since), Law and Justice, although it has governed effectively and introduced some popular policies honed during its long period in opposition, appears now to be struggling for inspiration. [...]

The most noteworthy development has been the launch, last Sunday, of a long-awaited new progressive party called Spring, led by Robert Biedron, a liberal former mayor and member of parliament. He describes Civic Platform and Law and Justice as part of the same problem, repeatedly emphasizing that he does not wish to engage in their war and saying in a recent interview that the two of them are a “corpse we will bury.” Yet it has been striking that, since announcing plans to re-enter national politics, Biedron has focused his attacks primarily on Civic Platform, despite in theory having much more in common with it than with Law and Justice. It is clear that, while he wants to remove Law and Justice from power, he sees his initial challenge as establishing a separate identity from the existing opposition and competing with it for votes. A poll in September 2018 showed that among potential voters for Biedron’s party, 61 percent would be defectors from Civic Platform, with the remainder from other centrist and left-wing parties.[...]

Alternatively, however, Biedron has the potential to energize nonvoters, those who are opposed to Law and Justice but, until now, have been unimpressed by the alternatives. Given Poland’s consistently low turnout (around 50 percent in the last three parliamentary elections), this creates great potential for disruption.

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Social Europe: Politics in Poland: eternal duopoly or refreshing breeze?

Most analyst are of the opinion that the parliamentary elections will be a battle for the centre. This is particularly evident in the strategy of the PiS government, which after two turbulent years exchanged the revolutionary cabinet of Beata Szydło with a more moderate team around Mateusz Morawiecki, a technocrat acquainted with the western and domestic establishment. It’s already become routine in approaching elections for the PiS to hide away its most radical and controversial figures to attract more centrist voters, who do not necessarily believe the 2010 Smolensk air crash to have been a plot by the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, or don’t feel the need to enthrone Jesus as the king of Poland. [...]

What’s more, the nationalist faction of the coalition quickly emancipated itself, also sometimes teaming up with the governing PiS, as in the case of the centennial Independence March in November 2018 in Warsaw, when the president’s celebrations practically merged with the biggest far-right demonstration in Europe. Also, the recent nomination of a nationalist activist and MP, Adam Andruszkiewicz, as secretary of state at the Ministry of Digitalisation is a clear sign of the PiS flirting with the nationalist right. Perhaps it is learning from the Hungarian experience: it wants to disable the nationalist movement before it becomes a serious political opponent, as Jobbik became to Fidesz. For sure, the nationalist circles will call in the big guns in May as well as in October 2019. [...]

In 2019 the stakes are high in Poland. For the PiS it is a matter of maintaining its monopoly and keeping the more radical right under control. For the liberals, it is about revenge and regaining power, lost after eight years in 2015. The new, emerging actors have nothing to lose—they can only win by mobilising voters tired of the PO-PiS duopoly. The biggest challenge, however, is that facing the left: the European and especially the parliamentary elections will be a fight for its survival on the Polish political scene.

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Social Europe: What Prospects For The Polish Left?

The success of ‘Together’ and other anti-establishment groupings in the 2015 election reflected widespread disillusionment with the country’s ruling elites and a strong prevailing mood that it was time for a change. The party also gained kudos among many younger, left-leaning Poles for its dynamism, ‘newness’ and programmatic clarity. However, ‘Together’ has failed to build on this promise and achieve political lift-off. It was wary about joining anti-government street protests on constitutional and ‘rule of law’ issues organised by the liberal-centrist opposition parties and Committee for the Defence of Democracy (KOD) civic movement. But it has proved very difficult for the party to cut through with its distinctive left-wing socio-economic message at a time when the Polish political scene is so sharply polarised around attitudes towards the Law and Justice administration. In April, the ‘Pooling the Poles’ blog that aggregates voting intention surveys showed support for ‘Together’ averaging at 1%.

The party’s biggest problem is that it represents a rather niche political offering attractive mainly to well-educated urban ‘hipsters’. Unfortunately for ‘Together’ the kind of younger, better-off socially liberal voters who in Western Europe would incline naturally towards left-wing parties, are in Poland often quite economically liberal as well and wary of some of the party’s more radical economic policies, such as very high tax rates for top earners. The less well-off, economically leftist electorate, on the other hand, tends to be older, more socially conservative and often inclines towards parties such as Law and Justice that are right-wing on moral-cultural issues but also support high levels of social welfare and greater state intervention in the economy. [...]

However, his critics argue that Mr Biedroń is a ‘political celebrity’ who has built his reputation primarily as a popular local government leader and campaigner focusing on moral-cultural issues – he was the founder of the Polish Campaign Against Homophobia (KPH) in the early 2000s – but has not yet been seriously tested on the national political stage. It remains to be seen whether his Mr Biedroń’s personal popularity can translate into a more high-profile role and if he is really prepared to undertake the difficult and painstaking task of building a new political movement from the bottom-up.

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